Now that I’m an adult, I have to bow a bit to my parents’ ideas of priorities. No one else is going to make me get to work on time or buy groceries so I don’t starve. When I graduated from college, all these adult responsibilities descended on me like some flying nightmare. And I’ve been struggling to identify my true priorities ever since.

I suppose it has something to do with self-actualization and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (which has always made sense to me, though I’m aware that it has been criticized). As little as I like to admit it, the basic necessities (food, shelter, sleep) do have to come first. And next, according to Maslow, is security, like employment. And then love and self-esteem. And only when someone has achieved all these things is there room in life for creativity. Practically, I recognize that this is true. If I spent all my time worrying about being unemployed or unable to keep my little family going, I’d have no energy for creativity. But if I were making my own hierarchy, I think I’d put creativity right after food. Because if I don’t have the opportunity to create, I’m still hungry no matter how full my belly is.

All this is very poetic, but like everything else, it comes down to day to day, moment to moment decisions. What should I do with myself today? What am I going to do in this very next moment? Can I write for another fifteen minutes and risk being late to work? Can I read for another hour or two at bedtime and be completely exhausted tomorrow? What are my real priorities? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for that. Not yet.

I’m stuck on some aspect of four different stories. I’m overwhelmed by the revising I need to do on Sword and Knife so I thought, ok, I’ll work on something else for a while. And that worked for revising and submitting a draft of Devil, a short story. But now I’m stuck again. I went back to Nyx with the hope that being away from it for six months or so would help me figure out what’s wrong with it. And maybe I have, but I still don’t know how to fix it. So I skipped to another short story, about vampires. And remembered it has no plot, as well as a host of other problems. I gave it a plot, but now I’m overwhelmed with worldbuilding. So I turned to a newer idea I had a couple of months ago, nicknamed Nightwalker. And I’m thrashing around with that too.

It hasn’t been that long since I wrote something from scratch. Just November, in fact. But it’s like I’ve forgotten how to build a story from the bottom up. And it’s driving me crazy.

This is one of those times I have to remind myself that I’m writing because I like it, not because I expect it to bring me fame and fortune. I don’t even want fame, though I wouldn’t mind the fortune. But sometimes I’m disappointed when it seems like I haven’t gained any ground, like this newest story is just as hard to write as the last.

I have to slow down, take a deep breath, and remind myself that I’m learning, and it’s ok if I don’t learn each new skill at the same rate. All stories are different and they all take different skills to write. So I’m in a phase right now where I’m learning a lot. It’s not that I’m stagnating, it’s that I’m working away at the problems in the back of my head and thrashing them out on a computer screen.

Instead of expecting perfection or even readability with each new project, I need to slow down, breathe, and just write.

I know this, and yet I resent that I have to chant those words like a mantra every time I hit a new plateau.

Breathe. Write. Breathe.

I want to keep loving writing. That’s more important to me than being published. I want to keep writing no matter what, because my brain gets itchy when I’m not writing. If I go too long without writing, I’m miserable. But I needed a couple of weeks to let the brain fog clear and to relax into writing again without the pressure of a word count goal hanging over my head. So for the past two weeks, even though I didn’t make myself write, I found my mind drifting again and again to my stories and what I’d do with them when I picked them up again. Because there was never a question that I would go back to writing.

Both John Scalzi and Justine Larbalestier blogged recently about what it means to be a writer. John was asked if he would ever quit writing and he basically said no, because it’s a part of who he is. Justine talked about the difference between writer as identity and writer as a career. Careers come and go, but writers write, and that’s really all there is to it. What I need to do is stop trying to write by rules that work for other people but not for me.

So I’m giving up on the daily goal of 500 or 1000 words. It’s the kind of thing that works well for a lot of people, but I don’t seem to be one of them. This doesn’t mean I won’t be writing, even writing every day. It just means that I’m not going to stress myself out about an arbitrary goal when all I should be thinking about are the stories themselves.

I have the same problem with fulfilling goals I’ve made for myself.  Here are the goals I made for 2008 at the end of last year. The ones about the blog?  Um.  *cough*  Let’s just ignore those.  I’ve also completely failed to complete the writing goals.   I don’t write every day, though I write more often than I used to.  I didn’t work on Heartwood, my NaNoWriMo novel from last year.  I did do NaNoWriMo again this year, but I haven’t finished the draft yet and I didn’t get involved with the local writing group like I wanted to.  As far as the non-writing creative goals, let’s just ignore those too.

So did 2008 end in tears for me?  No, because I accomplished other things that were important to me.  Instead of Heartwood, I tackled a story code-named Doppelganger and finished a complete draft.  Then I realized it was terrible and shelved it.  That may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but I’m getting better at recognizing both the strengths and weaknesses of my writing.

I shelved Doppelganger with the idea that I’d let it rest for a month or so, then go back and tear it apart. So the next day I started something new, code-named Small Town.  Because Doppelganger was such a mess, I decided to outline this one thoroughly. By the time it came to actually write the story, I was so bored I couldn’t get more than a couple of chapters down.  So I learned something else–I need to find a balance between knowing where my story is going and plotting it to death.  So onto the shelf with that, probably permanently.

Next, I dove into what I thought was a short story featuring a character I’ve had rattling around my head since middle school.  Then I realized it was a novel.  Then I realized it had no plot between the beginning and the end.  Code-name Nyx is resting, waiting for inspiration, because I love the characters and they keep talking to me.  I learned that sometimes I need to take things slowly, get to know my ideas before eloping with them.

The greatest lesson I’ve learned in 2008 is that I have no shortage of ideas.  I remember being much younger and “saving” plot ideas until I was a more accomplished writer and could do them justice.  I was worried that at some point I’d run out of stories.  But I’ve never gone back to any of those scraps, because there are some days, some weeks, when the ideas flood in faster than I can write them down.  The more I write, the more I open myself to creativity, the more ideas I have.  When it came time to choose a story to write for this year’s NaNoWriMo, I had six ideas fleshed out enough that I could have taken any of them and run to the finish line.

I picked a story code-named Werewolves.  (No, I don’t waste my creativity on titles, why do you ask?)  I “won” NaNo with 50,000 words a week ahead of schedule, with the novel going strong though not yet finished.  Writing Werewolves has gone so smoothly because I spent the rest of the year failing at my writing goals.  Instead of a methodical progress toward writing nirvana, 2008 was messy, incomplete, and more illuminating than I could have imagined.

I know my writing self better now.  I know that I need to write my ideas out, on paper if possible, but that I shouldn’t map out every detail.  I know that where my characters have been is just as important as where they’re going.  I know that it’s ok to step back for a day and figure out where I’m going next–it’s not a race.  Overall, 2008 was a year of learning for me. Learning what works for me in terms of writing process, learning what’s good, what needs work.

So what’s my goal for 2009?  Write.  That’s about it.  More specific goals don’t seem to work for me, because my creativity just dies when I try to force it away from the shiny thing that has it’s attention and onto what I “should” be doing.  I love language, but if I could, I’d remove “should” from the dictionary.  It gets me into more trouble than any other word.

I want to finish a draft of Werewolves and have some people read it, but I don’t know what I’ll do with it then.  I want to go back to Nyx, but if that story needs to marinate for another year, I’ll let it.  I’ve been thinking about Doppelganger lately, so maybe I’ll gut it and see what the insides look like.  I’ve even been thinking about hacking at Heartwood, maybe paring it down to a short story.

Or maybe I’ll ignore all these old ideas, put them up on the shelf marked “Learning Experiences,” and charge onward with one of the half-dozen ideas waiting in the wings.  Or maybe with something I haven’t even dreamed of yet.

So, the blog.  I can’t promise I’ll be consistent, I can’t promise I’ll be enlightening.  All I know is that I’ll be learning.  After all, I’m here to create.

When I was a kid, I spent three or four hours a day reading, and all weekend long if my parents would let me. I really didn’t do anything else, a lot of days, especially when I was immersed in the kind of fantasy series that hurtled me through one 700-page book straight into another, and another. Back then, I read The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien at least once a year, and I frequently re-read The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny, the Dragon Prince and Dragon Star books by Melanie Rawn, the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy by Tad Williams, and the first few Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan. These books shaped my imagination and my first efforts at fiction.

In fact, my first attempt at a novel features a first-person narrator who thinks a lot like Corwin of Amber and travels through a somewhat cartoonish version of Middle Earth. But in college, I gave up reading most fiction except what was assigned for my literature classes and have only recently started reading fantasy again. There’s a gaping hole in my knowledge of contemporary fantasy.

I’ve gradually started filling that hole, and now that I’ve read Kushiel’s Legacy, I’m kicking myself for those lost years of inspiration. Nothing compels me to write more than reading the kind of book that makes me completely forget about sleeping until my alarm goes off and I realize it’s time to get up and go to work. This inspiration goes beyond the imitations I wrote as a kid. Even then, I put my own twist on the characters and world. My “Corwin” was female, and my world was inspired by bits and pieces of many stories, as well as my own imagination.

But now, I have some experience in understanding the mechanics of a story, not just the emotional impact. Now, even as I’m swept away by the power of the story, I’m reflecting on what elements create that power. Now, even though I’ve completely fallen in love with Phedre, the narrator of the first three Kushiel’s Legacy books, and Joscelin, her consort, (and I haven’t crushed this hard on characters since Melanie Rawn’s Rohan and Sioned) I can step back and examine what makes them such compelling characters. I don’t want to imitate them, but I want to learn about them, the balance of traits, strengths and weaknesses, that create such sympathetic, yet admirable characters. And I notice all the little details that make the world of Jacqueline Carey’s story so exotic and yet so familiar. It gives me ideas for ways to make my own world come alive.

I don’t know if I’ll ever write something so incredible as Kushiel’s Legacy, but having the opportunity to study such a masterpiece can only improve my writing. And that’s what I mean by passive creativity. Part of me says I’ve been wasting time, devoting so much energy to reading these books. My laundry has been dirty and my fridge empty, this past week. I could have spent the time doing something “productive,” like working on the blog design and writing my own stories. But the creative part of me knows better. Reading is research, inspiration, sowing the seeds of future creation. Though I haven’t written this past week, my imagination is fired in a way it hasn’t been in a long, long time.

Every writer is told, again and again, that the way to learn to write is to read and to write. As simple as that, but much more complex. Reading teaches the writer what works and what doesn’t, what story elements will repel readers and what will drag them in. In the course of observing these things, I’ve learned ways to make my own stories better. So as I read, I am creating, imagining my characters better and stronger, my world more detailed and inviting, the tension of my plot rising to a more dramatic peak.

Passive creativity is the ability to incorporate all the lessons of life into your creative work. Whether you’re a writer, an artist, or anyone else with a problem to solve, practicing passive creativity will make your efforts stronger. Creativity doesn’t mean that every idea has to come from your head alone. We are all influenced by everything we see and learn, whether we acknowledge it or not. But recognizing these opportunities to learn allows us to apply the lessons directly to our own work, and makes it better and stronger for the effort.

I don’t see myself forgetting this lesson soon. If I want to write epic fantasy, I need to study the best, and even the worst, to see what works and what doesn’t. As complex and vivid as Jacqueline Carey’s novels are, I have a feeling I’ll be learning from her for a long time to come.

What inspires you? Are there books, songs, movies, art, that compel you to create? What do you learn from your inspiration?